Milan Fashion Week was “saved” by these 3 brands
While the crucial week for the future of fashion has just begun in Paris, let’s keep three messages from Milan that moved us.
PRADA
The uniforms as a new dress
In a world of hybrid warfare, climate change and algorithms, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons react with a fashion that liberates and empowers. In the industrial space of Deposito at Fondazione Prada, where the nakedness of concrete was broken only by an orange lacquered floor, Prada’s new approach to elegance was revealed: a military shirt with epaulettes, pleated trousers and black leather work shoes.
Bonus from Prada spring 2026 are the unusual combinations of colours and materials, and an equally unusual proposal of traditional dirndl-style dressing that takes us back to Miuccia’s first steps, back when she forcefully rejected bourgeois womenswear in search of bolder ideas of femininity.
Based on this outfit in which “the woman is protected, strong, and can think,” according to Simons, the collection showed a different way of “dressing well” where the working-class look is proposed as a “dress” that is “entertained” by glam details such as long opera gloves, earrings from the house’s new fine jewelry line, crystal embellishments and puffy protrusions of colored taffeta.
The notion of collage and the lack of strict structure were the central pillars of the show: skirts (all of them collectible!) were assembled from different sheets of pleating and ruffles, and others were loosely held together around the circumference by strips of braces passed over the shoulders in an utterly novel shape. No garment sculpturally outlined the body, as if all were designed to cover but not impose. Emblematic of this view, the wavy bras – they resembled a bra, but did not stick to the chest, nor did they form it – were proposed as a top.
Bonus from Prada spring 2026, the unusual combinations of colours and materials, and an equally unusual proposal of traditional dirndl-style dressing that takes us back to Miuccia’s early days, when she forcefully rejected bourgeois womenswear in search of bolder ideas of femininity.
JIL SANDER
Without decoration
Simone Bellotti chose Jil Sander’s historic Piazza Castello headquarters for his maiden show, eight years since he last hosted a show there. The return is interpreted as a commitment by the designer to return the house to its minimalist roots of the ’90s, when Sander expressed an abstract version of power dressing that didn’t need pads, strict lines and gold buttons to show its confidence.
With an aptness and confidence that even the most sceptical recognised, Bellotti drew a line between the hazy past of Jil Sander’s last years, reconnecting the house with the iconography that thirty years ago made it synonymous with the young woman. She showed white shirts and turtlenecks that were Sander’s trademark, tailored jackets and coats (in grey and black) with short lapels and accentuated waists, straight skirts with horizontal slits [a direct reference to Lucio Fontana’s spatialismo] and flashes of vibrant colour in fitted, shrunken knitted or sheer tube dresses.
Looks without anything flashy, ’90s in philosophy but present-day, a proposition of rare purity between strict classicism and light elegance that seems the perfect recipe for the house of the “Queen of Less”, as Sander’s nickname was. Bellotti, though obscure compared to his other contemporary designers, proved in his brief tenure at Swiss Bally that he has an ease – and a strong conviction – to create clothes and accessories around simple ideas that have freshness and charm – and that you definitely want to wear.
Bottega Veneta
It-bags and knitted “marshmallows”
Louise Trotter, Bottega Veneta’s new artistic director, sent a leather net that opened into the form of a 3D knitted tote bag as an invitation to her first show. A few days later, at the entrance to her debut show, Lauren Hutton appeared in a new version of the knitted Bottega envelope she held at American Gigolo in 1980 and was instantly adored as the mascot of the house’s new era.
Bags, or more accurately, handbag-acquisitions, those that directly communicate the era and become symbols of complicity in a club of the elite, had become obsolete in the last decade. The demystification of the big brands, the new harsh economic reality, and perhaps the overload of social, have done it. Trotte, then, means to send us on the hunt for the ideal bag again, reviving the myth of Bottega Veneta’s intrecciato knitted handbags created in 1966 by the founders of the Italian brand.
Based on archival designs, Trotter has created less rigid versions of the original models, a veritable army of loose bags (from tiny evening bags to camel travel bags) for men and women, and then apotheosized intrecciato across the entire range of its collection, applying it to leather trench coats and jackets, trousers and shiny leather tunics, belts, epaulettes, collars, evening jacket lapels… This weave, with wider and narrower strips of leather, is everywhere.
Fortunately, to counterbalance the urban heaviness of leather, Trotter also experimented with weaving alternative materials. She knitted recycled feathers and rags from chiffon and cotton nets, creating bizarre blouses and skirts that vibrated and sparkled like lions from outer space.
For all those into crafts, this crescendo of technical virtuosity from the new Bottega offers a textbook of how tradition and craftsmanship can be transformed into the ultimate in luxury, and still look cool!
